This French cartoon depicts clergy, nobility, and other “fugitives” who fled the French Revolution in protest proceeding along the Rhine River on France’s eastern border. Outside of the Rhineland, thousands of French émigrés could be found throughout the Atlantic world during the 1790s, especially in the British Isles and North America.

In January 1794 government assistance to French Caribbean refugees in the United States became the subject of debate in the House of Representatives. Arguing in favor of the proposed legislation, one member asked: “Are we [...] to stand up and tell the world that we dare not perform an act of benevolence?” By February Congress had allocated some $15,000 in national relief funds for the refugees.

Between 1778 and 1798 France and the United States remained on good terms. By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, economic and social ties between the two countries, including American trade with the French West Indies, had grown considerably. French men and women increasingly visited the United States to engage in trade, purchase land, or to escape political turmoil in France.

Like the French volunteers who fought in the American War of Independence, however, few French visitors came to stay. Most spent only a few years in the United States–long enough to build lasting if superficial impressions about American society, but too short to achieve a genuine cross-fertilization of the two cultures. Some of these impressions appeared earlier in the writings of the French military officers who had volunteered in the American War of Independence. The marquis de Chastellux’s Travels in North America became a bestseller and was translated into English almost immediately. The best known of the volunteers, Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette, wrote six volumes of memoirs and letters related to America.

In the 1790s over 25,000 French exiles found refuge in the United States. More than a third of these exiles were émigrés (political refugees)—either opposed to the direction that the French Revolution had taken or threatened by the Reign of Terror instituted by the revolutionary government in 1793-94. The philanthropist and reformer François Alexandre Frédéric duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (1747-1827), for example, initially served the revolution but fled in 1792, following the August 10 suspension of the king’s authority by the National Legislative Assembly. While in exile in the United States, La Rochefoucauld wrote extensively about his travels and offered careful observations of such new American institutions as Philadelphia’s prison system.

Although they were hardly a unified group, French aristocrats became a divisive issue in the debates between the Federalists and Republicans, the two main American political factions to emerge in the 1790s. Led by Thomas Jefferson, the Republicans seized upon the close ties between some émigrés and their Federalist supporters to label the latter as the “courtly” and “aristocratic” party. The Federalists in turn decried what they saw as the hypocrisy of the Republicans, noting that Jefferson and other members of this party had many French friends as well. In any case, most of the émigrés returned to France as soon as it became politically feasible, mostly during 1797-99.

The largest number of French visitors, some 15,000 in all, arrived from the West Indies, where the French Revolution produced enormous political and social unrest. While many of these refugees came from France’s eastern Caribbean colonies--Martinique and Guadeloupe, most refugees (perhaps 10,000 or more) fled the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where slaves staged a massive revolt in August 1791. This conflict ultimately resulted in the founding of Haiti in 1804.

About one-third of these French Caribbean refugees were wealthy planters and their families, including many planters of mixed European-African ancestry. The vast majority of refugees, however, were either young slaves or former slaves whom their owners had brought with them, or poor whites. The presence of these West Indian refugees in nearly every U.S. port shaped American politics in important ways, influencing changes in slave law and trade policy and fueling debates over welfare and the abolition of slavery.

A few French visitors arrived with the dream of establishing farming communities in the Ohio Valley, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere. To be sure, not all of these men and women were enticed by the utopian view of America propagated by a number of 18th-century philosophes–what Durand Echeverria called “the mirage in the west.” But this group proved among the least prepared to deal with American realities. Many settlers fell prey to fraudulent land deals, such as the Scioto Company’s settlement at Gallipolis in southeastern Ohio. These ventures usually ended in failure, with many settlers returning to France.

French consuls, however, were better placed than most French visitors to observe the inner workings of American political culture and society at this formative stage in U.S. history. As early as 1778 official French recognition of the United States in the Treaty of Amity and Commerce brought France’s first diplomatic corps. Ten years later, the Consular Convention of 1788, signed by representatives of both countries, further defined and established the functions and privileges of French consuls and vice-consuls in the United States. With offices in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and several other major cities, French consuls managed trade and diplomatic relations and assisted French citizens in their overseas affairs.